Hacker News Reader

Comment by LastTrain | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something? There is no lesson learned here. No offer of help was accepted and nothing went wrong. Why beware? He hasn't even tried it. Hell I can't even really parse if there ever was an offer to help, just some suggestions.

View on HN

That's basically what the article is saying, though, isn't it? The author wasn't deceived by an offer and didn't suffer a setback, they're just commenting on the fact that offers of help always carry some kind of cost. In this case the cost was compromising on their goals for the project. It goes in the same basket as any other unsolicited opinion on the internet, including this one.

Except he has no idea what the costs would have been, and neither do we, because it never happened.

Except he does have an idea. Some people don't need a summary from a double-blind randomized decade-long experiment to know things

The author wasn't deceived, in fact no one even tried to deceive him. Rather, a guy offering to help clearly communicated his intentions, so that the author was able to make an informed decision to decline that help.

From the very limited information presented, it's not clear to me why the author would judge this offer to be a selfish act, or why this anecdote would support his conclusion to "beware offers of help".

I’m inclined to let his accusation of “narcissism” rise to the surface here. Clearly projecting.

If the person who offered helped had technical chops to scale such project. Why they would approach existing project owner instead of building it themselves?

My explanation is they did not have what is needed like tech skills or they were after taking over existing users.

Idea of scaling something up as author noted usually comes with idea that money will eventually follow. Post author is not money driven so it might be that person offering was also different in that way.

Because said user was invested in this community, and reinventing the wheel further is sometimes not beneficial. Some people are really good at specialized tasks, but might not be good at other tasks. Really good backend engineer, not so great at frontend. Perhaps they don’t have the necessary marketing skills required for growth of their own. There are too many unknowns in this story, and it isn’t fair to paint the person harshly like that.

The author has been burned by this in the past many times. You try to include people who say they want to help.. but when alignment is off it winds up just hurting the project.

I've encountered this with dozens of contributors myself.

I don't think you are. Not sure why I am reading this either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com